The present invention refers to a method for the management of the electric energy consumption in a domestic environment.
It is known that the theme of the home automation, i.e. of the integrated management of different electric devices being present in a home, is always increasing in interest.
The known home automation systems involve the presence of a central supervisor unit that usually provides to manage the different household appliances. By controlling some xe2x80x9cintelligentxe2x80x9d sockets, that therefore control the supply of the energy to the different household appliances by means of ON/OFF type operations.
These known centralized supervision systems present some drawbacks.
A first type of drawback is due to the complexity of the control units, which, having to manage a plurality of different domestic apparatuses in different times and ways, must be of the programmable type; this necessarily implies that the user is forced to a complicated programming activity.
A second type of drawback is due to the poor efficiency of the control and supervision system, which, as said before, manages the electric supply of different domestic apparatuses solely with ON/OFF type operations driven through the so called xe2x80x9cintelligentxe2x80x9d supply sockets; such control mode is clearly very elementary and approximate.
A third type of drawback is caused by the cost of the central supervision units which, because of its programmability, needs of a suitable user interface, composed typically by a keyboard and a display, and of an electronic control system with suitable elaboration and memory capability (for example a personal computer).
The main aim of the present invention is that of resolving the cited drawbacks of the known systems for managing the house electric appliances (represented, i.e., by household appliances such as washing or cooking machines), based on the use of supervision and control units of the centralized type.
Within such aim, the present invention strives to provide for an optimized management method, that avoids to overcome the limits of the installed maximum power being established by the contract with the electric energy supplier, and also allows to favour the use of different household appliances during time periods of reduced energy cost; this invention seeks similarly to show a method in which the optimized management of the energy can be obtained in a fully automatic way, without any action by the user.
These and other aims, that will appear clearer in the following, are reached according to the invention, by a method for the management of the electric energy consumption in a domestic environment incorporating the characteristics of the annexed claims.